Interesting thing to note, CV-16 is still around as a museum ship and is now the oldest surviving aircraft carrier. Even hosted a mustang car convention awhile back.
Someone could make a funny comic around that. All the other ships get scraped, lex gets to hang out with kids and fast cars in her old age. Table flips all around.
Interesting thing to note, CV-16 is still around as a museum ship and is now the oldest surviving aircraft carrier. Even hosted a mustang car convention awhile back.
More then that she was in active service up to late 1991, admittedly it spent the last few decades as a dedicated training carrier. Personally I'd always considered that CV-16 should have a personality somewhat like Houshou, she did after all spend longer as a dedicated training carrier then Houshou did in existence. Though maybe with a somewhat harder edge since she was also the most common Flagship of the fast carrier force that pretty much bent the IJN over a table from 1943 on.
Though it does somewhat raise the question, for ships that had very long careers do you focus on the war era or consider their service history as a whole when considering what sort of personality to give them.
Also, on another note, Lexington isn't the older sister. Saratoga was laid down, launched, and commissioned first by a fair margin.
More then that she was in active service up to late 1991, admittedly it spent the last few decades as a dedicated training carrier. Personally I'd always considered that CV-16 should have a personality somewhat like Houshou, she did after all spend longer as a dedicated training carrier then Houshou did in existence. Though maybe with a somewhat harder edge since she was also the most common Flagship of the fast carrier force that pretty much bent the IJN over a table from 1943 on.
Though it does somewhat raise the question, for ships that had very long careers do you focus on the war era or consider their service history as a whole when considering what sort of personality to give them.
Also, on another note, Lexington isn't the older sister. Saratoga was laid down, launched, and commissioned first by a fair margin.
Houshou's personality comes from the fact she is the first ship designed to be an aircraft carrier instead of being converted into one. She acts like a mother to the other ship girls because she is the mother of all carriers.
I personally feel that a ship's personality should come mainly from WWII, but I welcome aspects of their future accomplishments to add some spice to the characters.
The joke with Saratoga calling Lexington big sister is that author has CV-16 as a reincarnation of CV-2; they pretty much share the same basic character design.
Houshou's personality comes from the fact she is the first ship designed to be an aircraft carrier instead of being converted into one.
Actually incorrect, merely the first to commission. HMS Hermes was designed, laid down, and launched first, but amid the post war slump in Britain took quite some time to end up commissioned.
She acts like a mother to the other ship girls because she is the mother of all carriers.
But not really, as noted she wasn't the first designed and in any case other carriers existed for years before. They where converted yes, but who cares? They were still first and still pioneered the needed features, at best Houshou was merely one of the first to combine those features from the ground up. Unlike Dreadnaught she was not a clearly new type of ship that all quickly moved to emulate. In fact functionally speaking she wasn't really any different from the various conversions already in service and she added little new to the landscape. She pioneered nothing really, she merely leveraged knowledge gained from earlier ship and influenced rather little outside the IJN.
She acts like a mother to the Japanese CVs in my view because to them she legitimately is, she was the first Japanese CV and easily the oldest by the time of WWII. While working as a training ship she also influenced the development of the ships that followed and watching over the development of a younger generation is also a role associated with mothers.
These aspects are why I viewed CV-16 as possibly rather similar as by the end of her career she was decades older then any CV left besides the Midway sisters, but unlike them she hadn't been used in 'combat' in decades. She stayed at home being primarily responsible for training pilots and by extension carrier commanders and thus indirectly shaping the entire force. However she was also the only one left to have seen real high intensity combat with mortal peril involved. One can't help but suppose that however outmoded in displacement, propulsion, and weaponry she might have been the carriers that followed must have viewed her with no small bit of worship, particularly as the other ships that fought in 'the big one' began dropping out of the fleet, and you'd suspect that being nearly alone among the WWII era powers in having an entire fleet of legitimate successors to her mantle she must have looked upon the later ships with some vaguely motherly sort of affection as well.
It also might make you wonder how some of the lingering ships might react if they come back and learn some of those later ships they knew were destroyed by the Abyss in the initial fighting. Like if Lexington comes back and learns some of the CVNs she knew 'from birth' and regarded as something like grand kids had been sunk she might well end up super pissed.
I personally feel that a ship's personality should come mainly from WWII, but I welcome aspects of their future accomplishments to add some spice to the characters.
My issue is does that make sense? For the IJN ships it's largely a non-issue not many of the front line ships were very old to start with and nearly none survived the war, so defining them by their war experience makes sense, but what about ships that served well beyond it? Hikibi is an interesting example her post-war service has become a major part of her characterization even though it was comparatively brief. Yukikaze is occasionally flirted with, but her post war adventures largely seems to get subsumed into the more general 'PTSD' personality that dominates her more 'serious' stories.(This may well also have to do with the continuing issues with China.)
I would think that while the war experience should certainly be part of it the fact many of them had long fairly peaceful post war lives should be considered as well. One might expect they’d be better adjusted (or less angsty anyway) in general and perhaps more open to cooperation with former enemies then the IJN would be given post war experience. Any ‘historic fish out of water’ stuff also wouldn’t really apply to longest serving girls actually you could easily end up with the reverse when girls that served into the 70s and 80s or even 90s come back and see the 'outdated crap' they're being given to work with…
There also the fact a good number of US ships ended up in other countries after the war which would also seem ripe for silliness and a waste to ignore. Barb the US submarine credited with the most tonnage in the war ended up spending 20 years in Italy, Phoenix was sunk by a submarine... a British one... in 1982 (with a spread of WWII vintage steam torpedoes because the British homing weapon of the time was nearly as big of an ongoing disaster as the Mark 14 was), DD Charrette went to Greece and then later had the crew mutiny in protest against the the authoritarian government an action which became famous enough that it was decided to preserve her after she finished her 50 year career, CVL Cabot hung out in Spain for about two decades to fly harriers finally decommissioning at the end of the cold war after 45 years active duty and plenty of lesser known examples (Two Fletcher even spending about 15 years in Japan).
The joke with Saratoga calling Lexington big sister is that author has CV-16 as a reincarnation of CV-2; they pretty much share the same basic character design.
And my joke is that Saratoga was older then the original Lexington to start with making this doubly silly.
Commander, should we scrap her?Big sis, here I come~U.S.S. SaratogaU.S.S. Lexington